1. The cemetery was
certainly in use long before the City of Columbus formally
purchased it from John and L. H. Toliver on March 15, 1870. The
original seven acre purchase was augmented by three adjoining
acres on October 5, 1893. The cemetery was taken into the city
limits on November 13, 1939 (see Colorado County Deed Records,
Book O, p. 61, Book 18, p. 173; Minutes of the City Council of
Columbus Book 4, p. 760, Archives of the Nesbitt Memorial Library,
Columbus.)

2. The cemetery was in
wide use until December 1913, when a flood washed up many of the
graves and carried off many of the markers. It lay abandoned for
years thereafter, with only sporadic burials of longtime plot
owners. On March 13, 1939, two cemetery associations, the City
Cemetery Association and the City Cemetery Association, Colored,
were formed. Periodically, the city hired someone to clean up the
cemetery, but over time it was neglected. In 1970, it was cleaned
up by a volunteer crew led by Charles Redus.

3. Many of the burials
since 1913 have been indigent blacks. A few blacks were also
buried in the cemetery earlier. Fully one-fourth, if not
one-third, of the burials listed herein for this cemetery were
derived from sources other than tombstones on the site.

4. On December 28, 1929,
two men were killed in a three car accident west of Glidden. One
of the dead men was identified as John W. Sargent. Sargent was
carrying a diary which revealed that he had travelled extensively.
The local undertakers, Untermeyer Brothers, contacted his family
for instructions regarding the body. The family requested that
Sargent be buried as a pauper, and, on January 2, 1930, he
was.

Nearly five years later,
on October 31, 1934, an 18 or 19 year old man was struck by an
automobile and killed while walking on the road near Glidden. The
dead man had no identification on him, and though he was traveling
with another man, his name could not be determined. He was
embalmed and left in a coffin above Untermeyer's Store in Columbus
for some months. Visitors in town and people looking for a missing
person were taken up to look at him in hopes he could be
identified. Finally, after he had become nearly ossified by the
repeated infusion of embalming fluids, he was buried in an
unmarked grave in the Columbus City Cemetery.

Over time, the two
incidents were confounded and merged in the public memory. People
"remembered" that a man who had worked with Howard Carter when he
opened Tutankhamen's tomb on November 26, 1922 and therefore been
cursed to die violently had been killed in an automobile accident
near Glidden, laid unidentified above Untermeyer's for several
months, become known locally as King Tut, and then was buried. In
fact, it was Sargent who, according to his traveling companion, H.
R. Miller, had been at King Tut's tomb, not the teenage transient
who was killed five years later and never identified (see Colorado
County Citizen, January 2, 1930, November 1, 1934, March 7,
1935).